Miami International Film Festival 2013

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General Admission $10.50, Student/ Senior $9.00, Members $7.50. General admission tickets available online and at the door. Student and Senior tickets only available at the door. ALL TICKET SALES ARE FINAL. NO REFUNDS. NO EXCHANGES. NO EXCEPTIONS.

With the Support Of

The mission of the Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) is to bridge cultural understanding and encourage artistic development and excellence by provoking thought through film. By bringing the best of world cinema to Miami, MIFF presents the city and the film industry with a singular platform that fosters creative and technical talent.

This year we’re ecstatic to showcase an outstanding selection of films from February 28th thru March 10th. Preview the lineup here and follow the links to purchase tickets directly from the festival’s website!

CINEMASLAM 2013 – Thu, Feb 28, 7:00pm

A component of the Festival’s Florida Focus program, CinemaSlam 2013, Miami International Film Festival’s film school competition, aims to discover, showcase, and celebrate the work of undergraduate and graduate students in Miami’s film schools.

The people in an isolated town in the Ardennes are about to set the figure of “Uncle Winter” on fire in order to move away from winter and into spring. When the figure does not light up, panic starts to set in. Birds start falling from the skies, bees disappear and cows refuse to milk. The villagers become desperate as they watch their land and even their bodies and minds deteriorate. Three teenagers – Alice, Thomas and Octave – venture into the forest to look for answers. The Fifth Season transports us into a surreal world where no hope for salvation leads to the loss of human blood in a search for redemption.

Beto is a middle aged man working as a security guard at a local gym in Mexico City. Every night, he goes to work he is forced to watch over perfect bodies while his own suffers from a grave, deteriorating disease. Beto returns home every night to inject embalming fluids into his body to keep it from fully rotting. One day, Beto loses consciousness at the train station and lands in the city’s morgue where everyone presumes he is dead. Beto realizes he doesn’t have much time and that something needs to happen to get his life back on track, but is he alive? This amazing tale of a zombie living in Mexico City is captured with sensitivity, humanizing Beto, while showing the terrible toll of his burdensome disease.

WORLD PREMIERE! The always frightening Malcom McDowell stars as Dr. Stenson, head psychiatrist presiding over a sanitarium where hardly anyone ever gets well. In tales of three of the sanitarium’s most disturbed patients, we soon see why. Robert Englund, John Glover, Jeremy Ray Valdez (La Mission) and Lou Diamond Phillips (La Bamba) star in this triptych anthology from Texas filmmakers Bryan Ramirez, Kerry Valderrama and Bryan Oritz. Superlatively shot, this creepy “Tales of the Crypt” style chiller reminds of us how the mind is sometimes humanity’s most powerful weapon. And beware the progressive shift in the ill, from the sane to the insane…darkness descends.

Like a sadistic 12 Angry Men, this twisted edge of your seat horror film is set mostly in a baroque dining room where a murderous parlor game is played. Out of desperation to help her ailing brother, a young woman agrees to compete in a deadly game of “Would You Rather” with seven other desperate people. Only one winner will get out alive and receive untold amounts of money. As the game progresses, she must decide how far she will go to save her brother and herself. The deliciously devious plot has enough unnerving thrills and laughs to satisfy any horror film buff. Starring Brittany Snow, Sasha Grey, and Re-Animator’s Jeffrey Combs.

Circus dwarf Sadourni comes home to find his wife with another man. Consumed by anger, Sadourni commits a double murder and lands in prison for the heinous crime. He gets to leave prison every day in order to find a fit within society, but has a hard time getting work (mainly due to his height). He encounters a Dr. Simonki, who has developed a system to help short people stretch to normal height. Dario Nardi’s gorgeous black and white tale of passion and deceit is brilliantly shot with a hint of the surreal and a touch of darkness, a truly visionary allegory of the cinema of the past.

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE! Marina Abramovic’s life gets the stage treatment in an epic collaboration by avant-garde theater director Bob Wilson, singer Antony Hegarty from Antony and the Johnsons, Willem Dafoe and Marina herself. The result is an eye-catching piece creatively recorded by Giada Colagrande for the big screen. The sets are wonderfully designed, and the costumes are exquisite. Antony’s music resonates with the artist’s incredible life story. Her dreams become sublime, her anguish heartfelt.

WORLD PREMIERE! When her mom leaves town for the weekend, Kaitlan decides to invite her friend Jenna to spend the night over at her house. Jenna shows up with her friends Rose, Shane and Jeff, who want to party all night long, but when they realize the house is big, old and creepy, Shane convinces his friends to play “The Midnight Game,” based on an urban legend he read about on the Internet. In order to play the game, each friend must confess their biggest fear and follow a series of strict rules that keeps the teens confined in Kaitlan’s old house with nothing but candlelight from midnight until 3:33 AM. The teens try their hardest not to break any rules, as they are desperately trying to avoid the Midnight Man.

Internationally revered for the great beauty of his luscious black-and-white images, Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa’s career spanned more than 200 films over 5 decades in his homeland and Hollywood, where he worked with such iconic directors as Luis Bunuel, John Ford, and John Huston. This gorgeously crafted documentary is a masterclass in photography, alternating between stunning scenes shot by Figueroa, and rare interviews with some of the worlds greatest cinematographers, including Academy Award-winners Vittorio Storraro (Apocalypse Now), Janusz Kaminski (Lincoln, Schindler’s List), Haskell Wexler (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest), and Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire), as well as film legends Raoul Coutard (Jules et Jim, Contempt), Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love), Darius Khondji (Se7en), Affonso Beato (All About My Mother), amongst so many others.

Driven by the loss of his son to a rare genetic disorder, a visiting scientist in a mysterious laboratory in snow- cloaked Dresden pursues controversial genetic research to divine the human regeneration gene. Out of desperation to escape his past, he falls deeper and deeper into his colleague’s treacherous conspiracy to develop a new lethal virus which may have devastating consequences for all humanity. This provocative Cronenbergian thriller about one man’s quest for redemption is a deeply assured and haunting parable for the science of our time and the looming menace that so often sits on the other side of discovery.

Juan and Natalia are a well-to-do, upper-middle class, and intellectually sophisticated Mexican couple with two beautiful children. One day Juan and Natalia take their family on a road trip, and their jealous handymen use the opportunity to rob their house. Post Tenebras Lux depicts the return of Carlos Reygadas’ critique on the clash of social classes and the tension created by the different economic statuses present in Latin America, a journey that continues from his film, Battle in Heaven.

INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE! Mark Adams, chief film critic for Screen, perhaps captured Luiz Bolognesi’s breathtaking new film best when he described it after seeing it at the Rio Film Festival last fall: “A bold and striking adult animated film that traverses 600 years of Brazilian history – past and future – the ambitious Rio 2096: A Story Of Love and Fury fuses old- fashioned animation style with computer work and comes up with a film that blends legend with politics, finding plenty of room for sex, violence and mythology as it freewheels through the centuries.”

Pol is a 17 year-old teenager like any other. He lives with his mother and brother while going to high school. Pol has a secret friend, Deerhoof, a cuddly teddy bear who thinks, moves, and speaks English; Pol adores him. The appearance of Ikari (Augustus Prew), an enigmatic classmate, disturbs the tranquility of Pol’s boyhood innocence, and his mental attraction to Ikari takes on an unhealthy bent. An unexplained death and a series of strange events transform the peaceful students’ lives on an unlikely journey that will drag its protagonists on a downward spiral of chaos and death.

Gripping and surreal documentary shot off the coast of New Bedford, capturing the essence of modern man in the process of fishing, an activity that has put food on the table for thousands of years. Leviathan soaks the viewer in a world where tattooed fishermen, the boat and even the camera man live in perfect harmony. The weather, the sea and the animals surrounding the ship are also filmed in full; cameras are also put in the ocean to capture the images of the fish as they are being caught. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel have created a film based on a non- fiction concept that resonates with the natural world as well as the science of ethnography. Leviathan’s hypnotic footage was shot by 12 cameras ready to capture the fundamental nature of commercial fishing and its mind- boggling surroundings.

Wrought with violence and eroticism, Pietà continues director Kim Ki-duk’s foray into controversy with complexity and brutality. Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin), a psychopathic orphan working for loan sharks, terrorizes debtors and strongly suggests ‘accidental’ mutilations so insurance company payouts will cover outstanding debts. Kang-do’s cruel existence is upended when an older woman, Mi-sun, appears in his life, claiming to be his mother. Penitent and fraught, seeking forgiveness, she begins to carry out motherly duties for the impenetrable Kang-do. Laden with Oedipal tensions and the persistent ministrations of his mother, a sliver of shining humanity and compassion cracks Kang-do’s indomitable veneer. Director Kim Ki-duk twists Pietà in on itself and we are left to ask, pity whom?

General Admission $10.50, Student/ Senior $9.00, Members $7.50. General admission tickets available online and at the door. Student and Senior tickets only available at the door. ALL TICKET SALES ARE FINAL. NO REFUNDS. NO EXCHANGES. NO EXCEPTIONS.